Plight of the Honeybee
This post was originally published for Komeeda.
The fuzzy, humble honeybee experienced 15 seconds of fame in the media some years ago, forcibly becoming the face of a global decline in the pollinator community’s numbers — a community comprised of other critters, such as bumblebees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, and even bats. A journal by the Native Resources Conservation Service identified there being approximately 200,000 different pollinator species globally. Admittedly, we are subjecting the honeybee to the same treatment, but we couldn’t resist the pun.
When pollinator populations sharply declined in 2006 and continued to decline over the following years due to colony collapse disorder (CCD), the alarm bells rang. Researchers and activists cautioned of a drastic impact the disappearance of honeybees would have on the food supply system, and rightfully so. Let’s first understand honeybees and their struggle before we unpack why the alarm is justified.
What Happened to the Bees?
CCD is not well-understood and researches aren’t exactly sure what causes it. It is a phenomenon that happens in bee colonies when worker bees unexpectedly abandon a healthy hive, leaving the queen bee behind along with some immature bees. The result is swaths of bees dying off, as honeybees are highly communal insects with an absolute dependence on living within a hive to survive as an individual and to ensure the survival of the rest of the colony as well. The lifespan of an individual worker bee is a few weeks, but colonies will continue operating so long as it remains healthy, replacing an aging queen with a new one. Without significant external stressors, colonies are fairly resilient. Colonies are fascinating for the contradictions they hold; they are rigid yet adaptable systems with highly specialized yet coordinated castes, which allows them to be resilient. There is so much to gush about when it comes to honeybees and other social insects, but let’s not derail too hard.
CCD is not new to the world of apiculture; however, the rate at which beekeepers experienced CCD in their hives increased in recent years compared to the past. A 2015 report identified a 30% loss in overwinter colonies year-over-year since 2006, an increase from 17-20% in the 1990’s. Let’s briefly note that CCD can be a bit of a red herring when it comes to honeybee population declines, as it is not the sole reason for honeybee losses.
So, what’s going on here? Like many things in life, it’s complicated.
The simple, quick version boils down to a few elements which are, of course, intertwined. Those external stressors mentioned before include farming practices, climate change, pests and disease, and habitat loss. Let’s get to looking at these slightly more in-depth.
Farming Practices
First off is farming practices, which can be broken down into smaller bits, such as monoculture farming. This is fancy verbiage describing a farming practice which blocks off massive chunks of land dedicated solely to the growing of one crop. Thousands of colonies of honeybees are trucked around the country each year, stopping in a state for months at a time to pollinate monoculture fields before returning to their original home over the winter for a brief respite. Monoculture farming has a few effects on honeybees, including not providing them with proper, diverse nutrition (these fields can extend for distances well beyond the foraging range honeybees travel), causing stress during travel, and exposing them to pests which thrive in monoculture fields. Additionally, the use of pesticides is harmful to honeybees, impairing immune and neurological functionality (if they aren’t killed outright), making them susceptible to other threats such as disease.
Photo by Ran Berkovich
Climate Change
In a brief description of monoculture farming alone we hit on a few intertwining factors: habitat loss, pests, and disease. Let’s move forward and look at climate change, which can impair a honeybee’s life cycle and the ability to gather pollen to make honey which acts as food in the winter months. Climate change also encourages the population of pests to thrive, acting as another notch against the honeybee. In response to more pests running rampant, farmers spray more pesticides which harm honeybees to begin with. As if that weren’t enough, rising global temperatures render pesticides less effective, leading to a situation where pesticide use increases, doesn’t solve the pest problem, and further harm honeybees.
For such small creatures, they have quite a bit working against them. You may be wondering why any of this matters, so…
Why All the Hullabaloo Over Honeybees?
Briefly put, honeybees (and other pollinators) carry the weight of the US agricultural system on their tiny backs. Most fruit and grain crops grown in the US require the aid of pollinators, amounting to more than 150 food crops depending on pollinators for a successful yield come harvest season. Pollinator-dependent crops include blueberries, apples, cranberries, cherries, almonds, melons, and pumpkins. Let’s put a monetary value to the work done by pollinators: over $50 billion is generated in the US by pollinator-dependent crops per year.
Just as a bee depends on its colony for survival, we depend on bees to get fresh produce on our tables.
Decreasing bee populations could have major implications for how our food system operates. Get your brain ready for a cycle that would happen over the span of decades. It’s October, so let’s use apples as an example to illustrate the economics involved in the pollination trade.
Remember how bees are shipped across the country? Commercial beekeepers use their hives to produce honey, but the real money is in renting out their hives to farms, a business practice which relies on there being demand for that service. Fewer for-hire pollinators in the system translates to reduced crop yields of apples. As a consumer, you’ll see apple prices skyrocket as supply levels are slashed, which may cause you to think twice about buying apples. In turn, supermarkets will order reduced quantities of apples from distributors and farms. Farms will see the reduced demand and lessen their production of apples, meaning their demand for pollinators will drop. The commercial beekeepers — whose pollination services typically account for most of their income — will reduce the number of hives they maintain, or flat-out leave the apiculture business if it is no longer feasible to stay in operation. The number of honeybees will continue to decline because honeybees thrive better when their hives are maintained by experienced beekeepers as compared to wild bees.
Under normal circumstances when bee populations remain steady, fluctuations in supply and demand eventually level out, avoiding this scenario. Hypothetically, if the disappearance of honeybees continues to be a reality because of CCD our food supply system will collapse. Whereas bee colonies are flexible systems, our food supply system is not. At this time, there exists no other efficient and effective method of pollinating crops. In 2009, global demand for honeybees outpaced supply, meaning that a collapse is a real possibility should we lose bees, and is why the alarm has been blaring since 2006.
Without pollinators in the system, the ability to mass-produce the 150 crops we rely on pollinators for to grow is wiped out. Should that happen, the agriculture system would need to shift in some way, whether through the introduction of an artificial pollination method which can be done on massive scales, or by eliminating the monoculture farming in favor of smaller, more diversified crop fields with holistic methods of pollination and pest control. Alternatively, the system collapses and is unable to reconfigure and rebound, which pushes consumers to grow their own food. Depending on your particular circumstances, this last option may not sound devastating, but for those without the ability to do so, it can be.
Photo by Danika Perkinson
The Good News?
Honeybee numbers are on the rise. Well, maybe depending on which statistics you look at. The USDA put out a report in August of this year on the state of honeybee colonies. Let’s start with the good: for operations with five or more colonies, numbers of colonies have increased by 8% compared to the same time in 2019. The flip side of this story is a bit more desperate. Colonies lost to CCD from January through March of 2020 are drastically up (prepare yourself for this number): a harrowing 79% increase from the same time-frame last year. Further, colony loss in summer of 2019 was 32%, an abnormally high number for the summer season.
What we can extrapolate from this data is that beekeepers are taking measures to replace lost colonies through a practice in beekeeping called splitting hives, which is helping overall numbers remain stable, but the rate of colony loss —particularly to CCD — is rising at an alarming rate and we are seeing losses occurring at unusual times, indicating the problem is getting worse over time and climate change is likely having a large influence.
There are dichotomous approaches to these numbers: researchers and activists are continuing to sound the alarm and fight for changes to be made so that we can mitigate the losses; others see the stable numbers in colonies and peg the cries of caution and doom as unrealistic fear-mongering. Ignoring the loss rates and numbers is refusing to see the whole picture and to understand that while overall numbers are on the rise, it is a response to the problem. Like colonies, beekeeping has some resilience baked in, but even that resilience has its limits. The losses aren’t sustainable; they’ll eventually outpace growth of new colonies.
While the situation is dire, we can collectively work to address the problems honeybees and other pollinators face.
What We Can Do
The go-to answer for this question tends to be “plant pollinator-friendly plants!” That’s the least amount of effort we can do as individuals to combat the losses, but it doesn’t tackle the systemic issues involved. By all means, plant away, but if this is all we do, we can’t really say we are working to save the bees. The real work involves more effort.
Conscious Consumerism
More fancy jargon for saying do your due diligence as a shopper. Do research to see which product manufacturers support bee-friendly farming practices and buy from them. Use your dollar to put pressure on the system — stop buying apples, even if you love them and can’t get them from farms with bee-friendly methods. KIND is pushing the company’s almond sources to make changes to farmland to reintroduce pollinator habitats. Push other companies to follow suit.
Grow Our Own Food
This is a huge, likely unrealistic ask, as not all of us have the capability to do so. Apartment-dwellers, looking at you. We may not be able to grow enough of our own food to sustain ourselves, but any small amount that can be done will have an accumulating effect. When all else fails because we aren’t able to grow an apple tree on a fire escape, conscious consumerism kicks in. CSA’s from bee-friendly farms, shopping at local farmers markets, and supporting edible community gardens are second-best options.
Political Action
Push our elected officials to adopt legislation that promotes ecological farming. Beyond farming, put pressure on officials to enact environment-forward policies.
Pollinators face countless threats, many of which are the result of human interference in the ecosystem. With continued losses, the stability of our food system is at stake. There are actions and decisions we can make individually to help what seems like a hopeless situation. Next time you reach for a flyswatter to take care of that pesky bee which flew in through a window, maybe think twice.
Further engagement:
Almond growing in the US is particularly destructive on bee health and populations. This article from The Guardian looks at the almond pollination from the perspective of a commercial beekeeper.
This TED Talk by Maria Spivak is a fantastic overview of the intersecting problems contributing to bee population declines, comparing monocultures to food deserts.
This interview with the director of the film The Pollinators speaks on what we covered here and more.
For an academia-oriented look into monoculture farming, this essay from Umass Amherst offers an exhaustive explanation of the intertwining components which also happen to contribute to pollinator struggles.
